The present teachings relate to a system and a method for assessing chronic wound. More particularly, the present teachings relate to a system and a method for assessing wound for patients with, for example, type 2 diabetes and diabetic foot ulcers. One way to assess wound is to use a specialized camera to capture the wound image, then calculates the wound area and organizes wound images from different patients and stores images in a central location. Another way to assess wound is to use a mobile wound analyzer (MOWA), which is an Android-based software, intended for smart phones and tablets, for analysis of wound images. The wound boundary needs to be traced manually after which the software calculates the wound area and performs color analysis within the wound boundaries.
The conventional art does not address the problem of capturing foot images when the patients with diabetes have limited mobility. In addition, the prior art device is very costly and not affordable for individual patients to own, apart from MOWA, which, however, is designed for clinicians. Further, the prior art is not designed for joint use by both the patient and his/her doctor, through automatic upload of raw and analyzed wound images to cloud storage for easy access by the physician. Accordingly, there is a need to develop new system and method for assessing wound that overcome the above drawbacks in the prior art.
There is a desire and need for systems designed to operate in an unconstrained setting where the caregiver (nurse, technician and wound specialist) simply captures an image of the wound with a handheld device, without needing to record the distance to the wound or the angle between the optical path and the wound surface. In addition, the distance, the angle as well as the lighting conditions can be expected to vary from one patient visit to the next. However, in order to measure the wound area in absolute terms (say, mm2) the distance and angle must be known, and color correction must also be introduced to correct for changes to the color spectrum of the light. There is a need for systems and methods for correcting the wound area if the image was acquired at an angle relative to normal incidence.